The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight, demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running away from her husband's house. Her in-laws treated her like a slave, Aisha pleaded. They beat her. If she hadn't run away, she would have died. Her judge, a local Taliban commander, was unmoved. Aisha's brother-in-law held her down while her husband pulled out a knife. First he sliced off her ears. Then he started on her nose.

This didn't happen 10 years ago, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. It happened last year.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2007238,00.html#ixzz0v63izry9

Thank you Richard Stengel for having the guts to hit America in it's collective gut.  His reasoning and preparation are a study in a journalistic thought process.  Click Here for his message to readers.

The idea of a Speaker Boehner scares this independent into realizing what is at stake this fall.  I don't want and the country does not need years of a Congress that does absolutely nothing.  No, I'm sorry, I misspoke.  They might actually put the country in reverse and throw out ideas their No votes could not stop.

No climate legislation.  No jobs programs.  No health care.  No nothing for those that don't have.

NO  NO NO NO NO

Politico article "Cash for Speaker"

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-07-27/former-astronaut-sally-ride

What a great woman she is promoting science and math for girls. 

Astronaut Sally Ride was the first American woman in space. Today she is on a new mission: to make science cool for kids – especially girls. How she plans to encourage students to prepare for careers in science, technology, engineering...

Listen:  thedianerehmshow.org/audio-player

Yes sirree!  He must be getting into full campaign mode now.  Not that he ever stopped.

From Huffpo

NEW YORK — ABC's "The View" has welcomed many notable guests, but none more prominent than President Barack Obama, who is scheduled to visit for Thursday's edition.

In making the announcement on Monday, executive producers Barbara Walters and Bill Geddie said this marks the first time a sitting U.S. president has visited a daytime talk show.

They said the majority of the hour will be devoted to Obama's appearance, which will touch on topics including jobs, the economy, the Gulf oil spill and family life inside the White House. It is scheduled to tape on Wednesday.

"We are so pleased and honored," Walters said.

What a novel idea!  Not sure why I always forget to put up open threads when I'm busy busy at work.  Here you go.

They said women could never be officers as they could not command and men would never take orders from them.  But the Navy has shown this to be just another fallen shibboleth. 

The Navy's Sailor of the Year awards went to four women -- from left, Cassandra Foote, Shalanda Brewer, Samira McBride and Ingrid Cortez -- for the first time in the fleet's history. The women were also promoted to chief petty officer in a ceremony at the Navy Memorial in Washington on Thursday. (Photos By Dayna Smith For The Washington Post)

By Lisa Rein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 23, 2010

 

The submarine school in Groton, Conn., will include 19 women this year, the first group since the Navy lifted its ban on women serving on submarines.

 

On Thursday, the Navy reached another milestone, when women swept the annual Sailor of the Year awards for the first time.

 

Something very sad happened: a 15-year-old girl, pretty but emotionally troubled (aren't all 15-year-olds emotionally troubled?) got sympathy for her emotional troubles. Then she got attention from cute, popular, older guys by sharing her emotional troubles with them. She "hooked up" with those boys. Then those boys' girlfriends started calling her names like "whore." Then the girl hung herself.

What's horrible, what's unimaginable and almost horrifying is this: those school bullies then laughed about her death on Facebook.

But in the end, those bullies did not take this girl's life. She hung herself.

Before she transferred to the high school in Massachusettes, Pheobe Prince had a history of self-mutilation. It is very sad. She was only 15 years old, and did not have the life tools to constructively channel that emotional pain. Life is tricky and complicated and unfair. Her mother may have even been a decent mom doing the best she could to support her two kids after her husband's death. Some people blame her parents. Some blame the school. Many blame the "mean girl" school bullies.

A pivotal spot in political history.

Don't we all feel dumb now?  Every talking head saying how every other talking head jumped the gun without doing the journalist's job of checking the facts.  The White House doing the worst in this mess by reacting to a clip on a blog post because it might have an effect on the evening Presidential ratings.

And not just talking heads.  Even this blog has a post showing the original short clip that Andrew Breitbart used to target the NAACP.  

This is the time for us all to have the conversation.  Not about race or immigration, rich or middle class, tax cuts or jobs programs, abortion or adoption.

No

This is the time for us to have a thoughtful conversation about how we as a nation wish to converse about our future as a nation.

Do we wish to continue the one minute news cycle that demands instantaneous responses thus feeding the one minute news cycle?  It has become a monster that feeds on itself.  It especially loves to feed on instant polls and un-verified writings by unknown self appointed journalists.

Remember Tucker Carlson of the fabled bow-tie who kept his legs together everytime Hillary was mentioned?  Now he has come out with "proof" that the msm conspired to deprive Hillary of the nomination by suppressing stories of Reverend Wright.

Well he was one of the boyz who turned his back on our cries for help to expose Wright/Obama connection.  By our, I mean the many blogs that kept up a barrage of information to media folk like Tucker and were ignored.  Always seemed strange to me that the media boyz and girlz could read Koz and Huff Puff but could never seem to find Riverdaughter or Alegra or Partizane.

Now Tucker professes to be on the side of the angels in an appearance on FOX this morning as he said Obama stole the Primary from Hillary.  Here's a bit from his rag that he referenced.

The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”

 

UK - just change the names and it sounds much like US.

Mary Ann Sieghart: Women on top? You've got to be joking

For at least 20 years, we have been fed the line that the 'Future is Female'. But the future has always failed to materialise

 

What a depressing week it has been to be female. A psychopathically violent woman-beater and murderer is lionised. A film director who drugs and then sodomises a 13-year-old girl is let off. A famous actor tells his ex-partner she deserves to be "raped by a pack of niggers". And the Catholic Church elevates women's ordination to the same level of offence as child abuse. Thanks, chaps.

 Initial Story:

Just days after the NAACP attached allegations of racism to Tea Party members, a video from a NAACP Freedom Fund banquet was posted at BigGovernment.com. The video shows an Agriculture Department official named Shirley Sherrod, entertaining her NAACP audience with a personal story of how she withheld help from a white farmer, who faced bankruptcy. The March 27th video has forced her resignation.

In the clip, Sherrod (Georgia’s Director of Rural Development) claims the white farmer took a long time showing he was "superior" to her:

"He had to come to me for help. What he didn't know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him. I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land -- so I didn't give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough."

Her NAACP audience laughed and applauded as she described how she decided the white farmer’s future. You can see it here at Partizane and draw your own conclusions:

Filed under Sunday funnies.  The brilliant leaders of Gaza have decided to enforce lomg standing tradition banning women from smoking the hooka in public cafes.  Reason.  Their husbands may divorce them for public smoking so Hamas is really just preserving the family.

From AP via USA Today:

Gaza's Hamas rulers are banning women from smoking water pipes in cafes, claiming it violates tradition and leads to divorce.

Plainclothes security officials handed out the ban order to Gaza City cafes over the weekend.

Police spokesman Ayman Batneiji said Sunday that officers are enforcing Gazan traditions. He said husbands often divorce women seen smoking in public but offered no evidence to support that claim.

The pipes are popular with both men and women in Gaza.

After Barack Obama was elected US Senator from Illinois, one of his first political acts on the world stage was to get on a plane to Kenya and campaign for his cousin Raila Odinga in that country’s 2007 presidential election. (The photo on the left shows the POTUS with Odinga.)

Obama mounted political platforms with Odinga throughout Kenya and spoke on his cousin’s behalf. For his part, Raila Odinga promised to implement strict Islamic Sharia law within a new Constitution, if he received the Muslim vote in the predominantly Christian country. Despite Obama’s efforts, Raila Odinga did not win that election.

As a result of that loss, Odinga’s supporters followed Alinsky methods, and violent unrest broke out in the country. They shocked the civilized world when they locked Christians in a church, torched it, and allowed their victims (mostly women and children) to burn to death. The marauders killed hundreds and many Kenyans left their homes to escape the violence. Kenyan women and children as young as two were raped by gangs of thugs that hoped their savage acts would disgrace their victims' families.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-07-16/obama-ban-on-a...

Women’s organizations are crying foul at an Obama administration ban on abortion coverage in a new insurance program.

from the Daily beast Dana Goldstein

As President Barack Obama heads off to vacation in Maine, yet another interest group is furious with his administration. Feminist organizations say Obama has stepped beyond the letter and spirit of the new health-care reform law by banning abortion coverage in a new insurance program for people with pre-existing conditions.

<snip>

HT Cassy Fiano 

I found this at http://www.cassyfiano.com/2010/07/racism-test

 Do You Like Him Any Better Now?

It is beginning to get lovely.  Little articles pop up here or there saying Mrs. Clinton should run against Obama for the 2012 nomination.  But as Mediaite said, "this is the first time I can recall seeing it in a serious publication".

Wall Street Journal op-ed by: Pete Du Pont

<snip>

And why would the Democratic Party want to do that? Because the re-election of President Obama is becoming more problematic. The latest Rasmussen Reports polls show the dramatic decline of the presidential approval index, the difference between those who "strongly approve" of Mr. Obama's performance and those who "strongly disapprove." It began at plus 25% when the new president was sworn in, and has steadily declined to minus 13%.

It isn't just the president whose poll numbers are falling fast. According to recent Harris polling, Vice President Biden viewed favorably by 26% of the public and unfavorably by 45%. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi does even worse, 20% positive to 49% negative. A June Nevada poll gave Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, 33% approval and 52% disapproval.

But the greatest contrast and most interesting statistic is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's ratings: 45% favorable and only 35% unfavorable.

<snip>

I'm just a dumb guy but I'm taken with Sarah Palin's Mama Grizzlies effort to empower women. Something has gone horribly wrong with our government and something needs to be done about it. The leftists (progressives, communists, socialists, Marxists, statists, collectivists) should never have been allowed to take over the DNC and BHO should never have won the nomination. Had the DNC rules and bylaws not been changed in 2007, HIllary Clinton would have won the nomination. Without the corruption and voter intimidation in the caucuses, Obama would never have won. Had Hillary won the nomination, she would be president now and the country would probably be on the right track. Obama is president, we're on the wrong track, and we're screwed. Even though Hillary is a self-professed progressive, we'd be doing far better than we are now.

Meenal Vamburkar wrote and interesting piece based on Naomi Schoenbaum's piece in the New Republic concerning Elena Kagan and her gender identity or lack thereof.  Interesting reading both.

It’s almost human nature to reflect back and think, “look how far we’ve come.” In a sense, this is what The New Republic’s Naomi Schoenbaum does in her piece, “Post-Gender Justice.” Examining what being a woman means to Elena Kagan, Schoenbaum notes that Kagan does not explicitly define herself as a woman leader in the law. But while the soon-to-be-confirmed Supreme Court nominee might not be defining herself through her gender, the media has tried its best to do it for her.

Schoenbaum contrasts Kagan with those who came before her — citing that while Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg might not have had a choice, Sonia Sotomayor deliberately brought up her gender identity:

Schoenbaum's article.

There was evidence that the New Black Panther Party intimidated voters on Election Day in November, 2008. Many Americans can still remember the video of the two NBPP members, dressed in military style para uniforms outside a polling place near downtown Philadelphia.

Former civil rights lawyer Bartle Bull, who is publisher of the Village Voice, calls the NBBP intimidation in Philly "the most blatant form of voter intimidation I've ever seen." Mr. Bull happened to be there that day, along with others who witnessed the two Black Panthers intimidate voters. One of them, they say, brandished a nightstick at the entrance and pointed it at voters. They say both men made racial threats. Bull says he heard one yell: "You are about to be ruled by the black man, Cracker!" 

just now which urged watching the station at 9AM for revelations that BO stole election from HC.  I was too late to get the whole story - just passing on what I heard.  Couldn't find anything on google  or Drudge which usually are prompt with this kind of stuff.

Pakistani police officer Jamshed Masih was transferred about 30 miles from his home district to Jhelum in Islamabad. The poor officer’s life will never be the same after that simple move. His loving wife, two daughters, and two young sons were murdered shortly after moving into their rented home. (Area police refuse to file a murder complaint, because they fear the religious leader at the center of the crime.)

According to locals, religious leader Maulana Mahfooz Khan was made aware of the new neighbors by members of his mosque, who supported religious custom as it was taught to them:

“We cannot allow these non-Muslims to live here; they will be a bad influence on our children.”

So, according to the officer, Khan called him to the local mosque and told him to pack up and leave:

“You must leave with your family, no non-Muslim has ever been allowed to live in this colony – we want to keep our colony safe from scum.”

An Iranian woman faces death by stoning after being convicted of adultery. Amnesty International yesterday called on the Iranian authorities to halt the imminent execution of mother-of-two Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani and the hanging of another woman said to be a political activist.

Ashtiani was convicted of having an ‘illicit relationship’ with two men in May 2006 and received 99 lashes as her sentence. Despite this, she has also been convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. The 43-year-old has retracted a ‘confession’ she said was made under duress.

Appealing for help to the international community, her daughter, Farideh, 16, and son, Sajad, 20, said yesterday: ‘Please help end this nightmare and do not let it turn into a reality. Help us save our mother.’

Sign the Petition  Not that those barbarians will care what the rest of the civilized world thinks.

Me, NewHampster, thinks that the Wrong Wing, heads up their arses, supporters of big oil, big coal and everything else killing our planet;  I think they once again fooled the press and the world.  They successfully made the Copenhagen Climate Summitt into a non-event by using their skill at distraction.  They won on guns and now they're winning on doing squat about climate change. 

You know, I don't very much like Obama.  I think he is a lying, cheating, in way over his head definition of the word politician.  But if you trust Repugs to do a better job fixing our economy or world, then you have been conned as badly as the Obama Horde of 2008.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/climategate-scientists-cleared-of-all-acc...

From Glynnis MacNicol at Mediaite:

"In a blow to global warming deniers everywhere, an official review released today has cleared all the Climategate scientists from charges of dishonesty. Turns out what they were guilty of was not sharing enough.

You will recall that just ahead of last year’s big Copehenhagen Climate Conference, which was attended by many heads of state including President Obama, private emails were released to the public that together appeared to show some top scientists had fudged data to prove that global warming was taking place. Cue: Climategate. The timing of the release of the emails was considered suspicious at the time, though this did not stop a whole lot of climate change naysayers from jumping on the emails as proof that global warming was merely one big conspiracy. After today they may have to look elsewhere."

I’ve been trolling, and one site led to another, and then to many others last night, until I ended up at the Americans for Tax Reform website. (Yikes! It was full of bad news.)

You and I will be paying more in taxes next year, despite Obama’s promise not to raise them on the middle class or families making less than $250,000. (As a reminder that he promised not to increase our taxes, I will refer to the tax hikes in this post as NObamataxes.) The ATR website has a great graphic of the Socialist in the White House and his empty promise, so I’ve imported it and posted it below for a memory bump:

According to ATR, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect in less than six months. The tax hikes will hit young singles, families, small businesses, and the elderly. In short, if you are a breathing American in 2011, chances are you will be impacted by NObamataxes in three great waves, starting on January 1, 2011. 

What is jihad? We saw the results of it on 9/11, and we hear the term all the time. As we near the 9th anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center, can you clearly define what jihad is? Or, has the political correctness of the current inhabitant of the Oval Office confused you?

Since those who fight jihad seek to annihilate us and our way of life, it’s important that all of us, who live in America's free democratic society, understand what jihad is. If that means kicking PC to the curb, so be it. (In the final analysis, multiculturalism only works when everyone is on the same page and wants to get along.)

In Islam, the relationship of Muslims to non-Muslims is set in the context of a war. Thus, jihad is an Islamic war of Muslims against non-Muslims. There are verses in the Qur'an and in the Islamic hadiths (the written traditions of Muhammad in the books of Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi, Abu Dawud, and others) that deal with clarifying the concept of jihad. Since the term is explained in Islamic religious books, some contend that a theological base underlies jihad; it is for that reason that they call jihad a “holy war.”

Such a response is only half an answer, because the purpose of jihad is not directly to spread the Islamic religion. Jihad is meant to extend sovereign Muslim power; once a country is conquered than the faith follows the flag. Jihad is about Muslim conquest. Jihad is the compulsory, communal effort to expand the territories ruled by Muslims at the expense of territories ruled by non-Muslims.

If you look at jihad in terms of conquest, you can understand why many people argue Islam is a socio-political movement that is not confined to religion. They argue that it seeks to control all aspects of society. They argue that it seeks to control all aspects of an individual’s life. Those arguments have merit.